Michael Stonebraker was a Professor of Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley, for twenty-nine years, where he developed the Ingres and Postgres relational database systems. He is currently an adjunct professor at MIT, where he has been involved in the development of the Aurora,[5]C-Store, H-Store, Morpheus, and SciDB systems.

Major projects[edit]

Stonebraker's career can be broadly divided into two phases; his time at Berkeley when he focused on relational systems, and the past decade at MIT where he has developed several new data management systems.

The Berkeley years (1971–2000)[edit]

Stonebraker joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1971. It was there that he did his early pioneering work on relational databases in the Ingres and Postgres projects.

Ingres[edit]

In 1973, Stonebraker and his colleague Eugene Wong decided to start researching relational database systems after reading a series of seminal papers published by Edgar F. Codd on the relational data model.[6]

Their project, known as Ingres (Interactive Graphics and Retrieval System),[7] was one of the first systems (along with System R from IBM) to demonstrate that it was possible to build a practical and efficient implementation of the relational model. A number of key ideas from INGRES are still widely used in relational systems, including the use of B-trees, primary-copy replication, the query rewrite approach to views and integrity constraints, and the idea of rules/triggers for integrity checking in an RDBMS. Additionally, much experimental work was done that provided insights into how to build a locking system that could provide satisfactory transaction performance.[8]

By the early 1980s, however, the performance and capabilities of these low-end machines were seriously threatening IBM's mainframe market, and with the threat came the ability of INGRES to become a viable, "real" product for a large number of applications. INGRES was offered using a variation of the BSD license for a nominal fee, and soon a number of companies took advantage of this to create commercial versions of INGRES.[citation needed]

Postgres[edit]

After founding Relational Technology, Stonebraker and Rowe began a "post-INGRES" effort, to address the limitations of the relational model. The new project was named POSTGRES (POST inGRES),[10] and was designed to add support for complex data types to database systems and improve end-to-end performance of data-intensive applications. Postgres provided an object relational programming model in which fields could be complex datatypes, and where users could register new types as well as scalar and aggregate functions over those types. POSTGRES was extensible in a number of other ways, making it easy for programmers to modify or add to the optimizer, query language, runtime, and indexing frameworks. These features improved both database programmability and performance, and made it possible to push large portions of a number of applications inside the database, including geographic information systems and time series processing. This had the effect of substantially broadening the commercial database market.

POSTGRES was also offered using a BSD-like license, and the code forms the basis of today's free software, PostgreSQL. Stonebraker also led an effort to commercialize the code, creating Illustra which was purchased by Informix. PostgreSQL has been used as the basis for a number of other startup companies, including Aster Data Systems, EnterpriseDB, and Greenplum.

Informix acquired Illustra in 1996, and Stonebraker became Informix's CTO, a position he held until September 2000.

Informix integrated Illustra's O-R mapping and DataBlades into the 7.x OnLine product, resulting in Informix Universal Server (IUS), or more generally, Version 9.

Mariposa and Cohera[edit]

After the Postgres project, Stonebraker initiated the Mariposa[11] project which became the basis of Cohera Corporation. The main idea behind Mariposa was to build a federated database over an economic model of resource trading, in which data distributed across multiple organizations could be integrated and queried from a single relational interface, governed by site-specific policies that would charge for data processing and storage. These economic policies allowed traditional ideas in query optimization to be carried out over competing sites, and also served as the basis for data storage, replication and movement within a federation.

Cohera's initial mission was to commercialize ideas from the Mariposa project, but eventually focused on a Business-to-Business Catalog Management application implemented on top of the core federated data integration engine. Cohera's intellectual property was purchased by PeopleSoft in 2001, and used as the basis of PeopleSoft's Enterprise Catalog Management. PeopleSoft was in turn purchased by Oracle in 2004.

The MIT years (2001–present)[edit]

Stonebraker moved to MIT in 2001, where he began another series of research projects and founded a number of companies.

Aurora and StreamBase[edit]

In the Aurora Project, Stonebraker, along with colleagues from Brandeis University, Brown University, and MIT, focused on data management for streaming data, using a new data model and query language. Unlike relational systems, which "pull" data and process it a record at a time, in Aurora, data is "pushed", arriving asynchronously from external data sources (such as stock ticks, news feeds, or sensors.) The output is itself a stream of results (such as windowed averages) that are sent to users.

Morpheus and Goby[edit]

In 2006, Stonebraker started the Morpheus project, along with researchers from the University of Florida. Morpheus is a data integration system which relies on a collection of "transforms" to mediate between data sources. Each transform provides a queryable interface to particular web site or service, and Morpheus makes it possible to search for and compose multiple transforms to provide a new service or a unified view of several services.

In 2009, Stonebraker co-founded Goby,[12] a local search company based on ideas from Morpheus, for people to explore new things to do in free time.

H-Store and VoltDB[edit]

In 2007, with researchers from Brown University, MIT, and Yale University, Stonebraker started the H-Store project. H-Store is a distributed main-memory OLTP system designed to provide very high throughput on transaction processing workloads.

In 2009, Stonebraker co-founded, and currently serves as CTO of, VoltDB a commercial startup based on ideas from the H-Store project.

NoSQL[edit]

Data Analysis & Extraction[edit]

Students[edit]

In addition to his contributions to academia and industry, Stonebraker has trained more than 30 students who have themselves contributed significantly to academia and industry. Notable students include:[1]